June 11th 2005 GLLUG (Week to go!) Announcement

events

I’m pleased to announce that the next GLLUG meeting will be held on June 11th between 13:30 and 18:00 at New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. This is located in the shadow of the BT Tower.

The nearest tube stations are Great Portland Street, Warren Street and Goodge Street. Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus are also within easy walking distance. New Cavendish Street campus on Streetmap. This event is FREE to members and non-members.

Eventually the details for this meeting will live on the: GLLUG website but for now they are available on Unixdaemon.net, my personal site.

Speakers:

We currently have four talks lined up for this meeting, I’ll post updates with the full, speaker provided summaries as I get them. The talks (assuming no problems!) will run in this order with a number of short breaks to allow toilet/drink runs. Please don’t go to the same room for both :)

Christian Smith (Micromuse) and Stig Brautaset (Fotango)

Autoconf, Automake and libtool, collectively known as Autotools, provide a portable platform for project configuration and build management. This talk will introduce the concepts used within autotools and an example autotools based project to demonstrate these concepts.

Chia-liang Kao (Fotango) -- NEW SPEAKER!

Version Control without the Headaches
  • recap of various version control systems, and the slow evolution.
  • what svk learned and has stolen the best part from other systems.
  • how svk helps in an environment that svn is already deployed.
  • how svk helps sysadmins: painless distributed /etc versioning.
  • svk development strategy, and why you can trust it.

Matthew Bloch (Bytemark)

Using Ruby on Rails to manage a growing network

My emphasis will be on a show & tell approach to building a Rails application, as well as a brief introduction to Ruby. I want to demonstrate some of the tricks we can do to automate all our ISP- related chores:

  • DHCP configuration to put our unsold dedicated servers to work as a super-speedy compile farm.
  • DNS configuration to address individual servers by physical location (did I just break that server? uh... ping u27.rack4.telehouse etc.)
  • IP address allocation and tracking, automatic routing of abuse emails
  • Automatic configuration of Ciscos for terminal servers, routing and ADSL configuration.

Ian Pratt (Xen)

A discussion of Xen with a deeper technical focus on certain features.

Note: Unfortunately Michael Meeks won’t be able to speak at this meeting as previously announced, despite his patience and very generous flexibility in scheduling, I was unable to accommodate all the speakers on the date of the event.

After the talks we’ll be heading over to the (5 minutes away) Greenman Pub for drinks and then off for food at a to be decided restaurant. Thanks for this meeting go to:

  • Sean Tohill for providing, and being very flexible with, the venue.
  • Michael Meeks for putting up with my rescheduling.
  • The speakers for donating their time.